


Ellie Told Him So

by Vaulttie



Series: Soulmate AU Fics [2]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Soulmate AU, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:27:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24437431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaulttie/pseuds/Vaulttie
Summary: Everyone has heterochromia, one eye is your natural color, the other is your soulmate’s natural color. When you meet your soulmate, your eyes both become their natural colors.
Relationships: Female Sole Survivor/Nick Valentine
Series: Soulmate AU Fics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763428
Comments: 4
Kudos: 98





	Ellie Told Him So

Nora didn’t have a soulmate. Neither did Nate. Their eyes had always been one dull shade without the slightest deviation between them. This happened, sometimes, when someone’s soulmate hadn’t been born yet. As Nora grew, she began to realize that her eye would not change color; she would not get a soulmate. By the time she had grown past the point where such an age gap between herself and her soulmate would be ridiculously inappropriate, she had made peace with this fact, accepted it.

Nora had met Nate at a college party, seeing his eyes, both the same shade of deep brown, and had politely congratulated him on finding his soulmate at such a young age. He’d smiled sadly at her, an expression that she had made many times, and quietly explained that he did not have a soulmate. She perhaps came off a little too excited as she told him that she didn’t have one either. She had thought she was alone in her plight for so long. They became close quickly, finding solace in each other. Nora had even come to love Nate, but the knowledge that their connection paled in comparison to real soulmates always lurked in the back of her mind.

Nora was overjoyed when she looked into her son’s eyes for the first time to find that they were two different colors. Shaun had a soulmate, unlike his parents. It was only a mere eight months later that the bombs fell. Nate clutched Shaun as they ran to the shelter. Soulmates huddled in each other’s arms as the platform descended too slowly. Nora struggled into a vault suit. She stepped into a pod. Her world grew dark and cold. Her view of her husband and son in the pod across from her faded. Nora sleeps.

She wakes an unknowable amount of time later. Her husband is killed and her son is stolen. She beats helplessly against the inside of her pod. She is given no time to grieve. The killer and the kidnappers leave her as the only living thing in a tomb of frozen corpses. Nora sleeps. 

The door to Nora’s pod opens with a hiss and she falls, gasping, to the floor. She lays a trembling hand against the front of Nate’s pod, head lowered, unable to make herself press the button to open it. As she turns to find an escape, she passes her reflection in the glass of one her neighboring pods. Her left eye is the same flat, boring blue as it has always been. Her right eye glows an otherworldly amber. She blinks and her reflection is gone, replaced with the sight of her neighbor’s frozen corpse trapped behind the glass. Nora shivers and sets back on her quest to escape, her steps now hurried.

\-------------------------------

Nick had always gotten some strange looks from passersby. As if his ragged, beaten up robotic countenance hadn’t been creepy enough, whatever jackass designed him had given him two different colored eyes. His left eye glowed yellow like all the other gen 2’s eyes did. His right did not glow, but was a soft, deep blue. Nick would not, _could not,_ believe that he had a soulmate. It had to be some sick joke by the scientists who had cobbled him together and shoved a detective’s mind into his head.

It is hard for Nick not to contemplate these things as he sits, trapped, in a vault filled with meatheads. He doesn’t like empty time. Empty time makes him think. About himself. About the old Nick. Jenny had been the old Nick’s soulmate. How foolish of him to entertain the thought that he would get a soulmate just because pre-war Nick’s consciousness had been stuffed into a robot host body. He is a robot, a synth, Nick reminds himself. Robots do not get soulmates. He clenches his hands into fists, he paces, he smokes, for it is all he can do to keep his mind from going to more painful places. 

\-------------------------------

Nora hardens on the way to Diamond City. She is certainly no wasteland expert, but she adapts well enough. Her aim is better than she would have expected, and she feels only mild disgust when she has to resort to less appetizing sources of food. She still trembles after fights and sobs when she thinks of the people she's killed for the sake of survival. Despite this, she finds herself helping people where she can along the way, keeping her eyes down when possible. Her glowing eye had scared her. She did not want to think that her soulmate had been born while she was frozen. She did not want to try and guess why her soulmate’s eyes glowed. Overpowering the rest was her aversion to thinking about how unfair it was that she apparently had a soulmate out here while Nate lay dead, frozen, beneath the ground. 

Piper, the woman who helps Nora get into Diamond City, tries to be polite, but her gaze keeps drifting to Nora’s one glowing eye. The mayor almost does not let Nora in, accusing her of being something called a ‘synth.’ Her sob story, a murdered husband and a stolen child, prompts him to grant her entrance; likely to keep from looking bad for throwing a grieving woman to the streets. Piper looks like she is about to say something about Nora’s eye as they walk into the city together. Instead, she asks if she can interview Nora when she gets the time. Nora simply nods, her head bowed against the stares she is already attracting. She had tried so hard to convince herself that some radiation thing had made glowing eyes the norm out here in the wasteland. Now, standing in a city full of people with distinctly non-glowing eyes, Nora’s hope crumbles.

Nora wanders the city, trying to shrug off suspicious and awed stares. A red glow at the end of an alleyway beckons her closer. Valentine Detective Agency. A detective seems to be exactly what Nora needs right now. The woman inside the warm little office that Nora finds herself in, Ellie, initially brushes Nora off. Nora explains her situation and Ellie, seemingly sympathetic, finally turns to her. Ellie audibly gasps at seeing Nora’s eye, the glow of it made more evident by the darkness in the office. Still wide-eyed with shock, Ellie explains that the detective is missing and tells Nora that he was heading to vault 114. Nora steels herself for another long trek that would inevitably result in a firefight. She grimaces at the fact that this was becoming far too common. Nora makes for the door when Ellie calls: 

“Um, miss?” Nora turns her head but does not fully face the other woman. “When you find Nick, tell him… tell him that I said ‘I told you so.’” Nora almost laughs at the childish request, nodding as she lets herself out of the office. 

\-------------------------------

“Gotta love the irony of the reverse damsel in distress scenario,” Nick says, his head tipped down, hat obscuring his view of his rescuer as he lights a cigarette. His savior laughs, her low voice like a breath of fresh air after being stuck with Skinny Malone’s cronies for days on end. He looks up in time to see one of her eyes, glowing with a familiar amber, fade into a lovely blue to match her other one. Nick watches as the circle of light cast on her face by his one glowing eye expands when his own mismatched eye shifts color. 

“Oh,” says the woman. They stare open-mouthed at each other until they hear voices down the corridor. She curses, unholstering her pistol and turning towards the door. Nick takes the lead without saying anything, finding it difficult to formulate his usual one-liners in the midst of his hopeful confusion. 

\-------------------------------

They had managed to convince Darla to return home. Nora’s heart stuttered as Skinny Malone had begun counting down. Nick had grabbed her wrist, pulling her from her frozen state and led her on a wild sprint through the vault. Now, she stands hunched over in the darkened corner of the city they had emerged into, her hands on her knees as she tries to fight off the panic that creeps up on her. An attempt at a deep breath results in a desperate gasp followed by a wheezing sob. Nick is in front of her then, pulling her upright and into his arms. He is warm, she realizes. She hadn’t expected him to be warm. She had surprised herself with her lack of fear at the sight of his utterly  _ non _ -human appearance, and she surprises herself now by wrapping her arms around his middle and sobbing into his chest. 

Nick lets Nora cry herself out into his trenchcoat. When her breathing evens out and her body stops shaking, she steps out of his hold, already missing his warmth. 

“Sorry,” she says, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I’m not used to all of this yet,” she waves her arm in a sweeping motion.

“I don’t know if anyone ever really gets used to it,” Nick speculates. Nora offers him a weak smile.

“Oh! I’m Nora, by the way. And I, um, need your help. Ellie sent me to find you.” 

“Ellie… She worries too much,” he chuckles. “I told her I would be fine.” 

“You were literally locked in a vault. And, speaking of Ellie, she told me to tell you ‘I told you so.’ I’m not sure what she meant by it.” Nick studies her face for a long minute, and Nora begins to wonder if she had said something offensive. Nick then erupts into boisterous laughter. 

“I suppose she did tell me so,” he says as he calms down. 

“Um, what did she tell you? If you don’t mind me asking…”

“She told me that I did have a soulmate.” 


End file.
